Electronic devices, including portable electronic devices, have gained widespread use and may provide a variety of functions including, for example, telephonic, electronic messaging and other personal information manager (PIM) application functions. Portable electronic devices include, for example, several types of mobile stations such as simple cellular telephones, so-called smartphones, wireless personal digital assistants (PDAs), and computers (including both laptop and pad/tablet-styled computers) having wireless local area network (WLAN) capabilities.
Many electronic devices having WLAN capability employ a corresponding WLAN chipset to support this capability. The WLAN chipset typically includes a wireless transceiver that utilizes one or more wireless protocols such as, but not limited to, an 802.11-family protocol, a Bluetooth protocol, and so forth. The WLAN chipset then also typically includes a non-wireless interface by which the WLAN chipset communicates with one or more other components such as a so-called System on a Chip (SoC). So configured, data as transmitted by a WLAN access point is received by the WLAN chipset via the wireless interface and passed along via the non-wireless interface.
In the past the non-wireless interface was inevitably faster than the wireless interface. With improvements over time, however, there are now wireless protocols having data-transmission bandwidths that exceed the bandwidths supported by many non-wireless interfaces. When the wireless transmissions are bursty, and the WLAN chipset has a useful amount of buffering capability, such a circumstance does not necessarily lead to problems. Instead, the WLAN chipset is able to buffer the incoming data and successfully provide that incoming data via the non-wireless interface notwithstanding that the incoming data is arriving faster than the non-wireless interface can accommodate.
When, however, the wireless traffic is more continuous and/or too voluminous, current buffering solutions can be inadequate to the task. In particular, at some point the WLAN chipset's buffer becomes filled and data packets are lost.